Every day there are more states legalizing gambling in some form or another. With new casinos opening up, that leaves many an opportunity for glorious concert venues to open inside said casinos. This weekend, an early Valentines Day celebration brought my girlfriend and I to the Xcite Center inside Parx Casino in Bensalem, PA for Third Eye Blind.

I’d never write in a post that I was allowed into a casino with an expired ID, but I will say that the staff at Parx Casino were some of the first authority figures I ran into in life that were actually human. Big screens, awesome lighting-the Xcite Center is open for business and recommended by the fine people at Concert Confessions.

Cool thing about Third Eye Blind is that recently they’ve been playing without openers. The times they did recently was Silversun Pickups(!). So the band hit the stage at 8:15, with frontman Stephen Jenkins sporting a shirt that said in all caps WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL. Damn right (#Resist)! They broke out with Losing A Whole Year, followed by Blinded and Faster. For the first time in over 100 concerts attended over the last 8 years or so of this Doctor of Journalism covering shows, I was in the building without a camera not included with my phone. Technology is a cool thing. So I decided it’d be a good idea to livestream Wounded straight to Youtube. The grainy video proof above is the result of that.

A song early on the record button, we went into high energy versions of Semi Charmed Life, Company Of Strangers, Graduate and Back To Zero. More on Back To Zero a little later. 3EB already rolls with some awesome lighting but the Xcite Center did nothing but make those lights look extra cool. I looked in the back after the show to see if Chris Kuroda was there, but I didn’t see him.

Dao Of St. Paul was a late audible, as the setlist originally had Slow Motion in that slot, but was crossed off in favor of Stephen Jenkins doing a solo acoustic version of this beauty.

Underneath the set list below, you’ll see a video of Back To Zero. Remember that this was an early Valentines Day night and there couldn’t have been a better gift I could have received than my girlfriend Amanda grabbing all sorts of content with a better mobile device than I. Incredible.

I decide to go on Facebook Live for the encore. I mean, are they going to throw me out on the last song? That’s when something different happened. After the first song of the encore, Stephen Jenkins starts saying how they’re a band about work ethic and that they don’t cancel shows. Then, visibly choked up and unable to fight back tears, he mentions his mom. About how in all his songs, she’s a common thread. He could barely talk as people just screamed out their support and well wishes. It really hit us all hard. We’ve all been there or are headed there. In that moment, Stephen wasn’t the lead singer of a big band, he was our friend that we all wanted to hug. He said he wasn’t sure if he could even sing the final number, we cheered him on as he dedicated God Of Wine to his mother.

Jay Porks here.. I like to go to shows and pass along the experiences to you in words, photos and videos. In my spare time I do Social Media for the Meat Puppets in addition to hosting a weekly podcast. Remember folks it\'s not all about the technicalities of the situation more than it is about what the situation brings to the technicalities... The Jay Porks Experience, take a stroll my shoes for a little while...